Leonard and Jamie / Photograph from Bettmann / Getty
Leonard Bernstein didn't leave the mark he intended.
Conductor, pianist, teacher, television personality, cultural ambassador: Bernstein* (1918-1990) was all of these things and more. But he longed to be best known as a composer. That was the revelation that struck me the most while watching Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than Life, Centerpiece selection of the 24th annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival.
At a public TV-like 52 minutes, this 2016 documentary from German director Georg Wübbolt (Herbert von Karajan: Maestro for the Screen, Solti: Journey of a Lifetime) can't hope to cover every aspect of Bernstein's life, and it doesn't, but his desire to be more--or somewhat different--than he was comes across clearly. And yet, as one unidentified speaker notes, "Leonard Bernstein lived five lives during the short time he was on our planet."
A lengthier profile might have also explored his complicated private life, provided more context about the classical scene of his era, and taken a closer look at the physicality of his conducting. When Bernstein led orchestras, his body vibrated as his hair took flight, his mouth made strange shapes, and his arms slashed through the air like a samurai on overdrive.
At Tanglewood / Heinz Weissenstein / BSO
Unfortunately, the screener I watched didn't identify any of the speakers or provide subtitles for those speaking in German, including Bernstein (he also spoke Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Italian), so I didn't get everything out of it I could. I appreciated, for instance, the story about how he wanted to be loved by everybody. "That's not possible," composer Ned Rorem said. "Well, that's my tragedy," Bernstein replied, but I couldn't say who conveyed that exchange, because he isn't identified, though even casual music fans may recognize composer Stephen Sondheim and conductors Kent Nagano and Gustavo Dudamel.
Fortunately, subtitles are sure to accompany this Sunday's screening at the Stroum Center. Better yet, Bernstein's daughter, author Jamie Bernstein (Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein), will be in attendance to help fill in the blanks. Former Seattle Times theater critic Misha Berson (Something's Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination) will moderate their conversation. Bernstein will also be at the post-screening reception to sign books, which will be on sale at the event. In The New Yorker, David Denby, notes that her book is "unique among classical-music memoirs for its physical intimacy, its humor and tenderness, its ambivalence toward an irrepressible family genius."
If, as he feared, Bernstein is better known as a conductor than a composer, he wasn't exactly a slouch in that department. West Side Story, on which he collaborated with Sondheim, opened on Broadway in 1957, led to an Oscar-winning 1961 film, and will find new life by way of Steven Spielberg's upcoming remake, which begins filming this summer--in addition to numerous Broadway revivals and regional stagings. Other notable composing credits include the scores for the Broadway musicals On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Candide and the film On the Waterfront.
Furthermore, his work lives on in ways that he couldn't have predicted, like the six Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra pieces by Benjamin Britten and Camille Saint-Saëns that Wes Anderson combined with Alexandre Desplat's score for 2012's youth-centric Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson even includes the sound of Bernstein's deep, nicotine-burnished voice). For many film goers, these New York Philharmonic pieces may have marked their introduction to Bernstein--and to classical music in general.
In addition, Bradley Cooper has decided on a biopic, Bernstein, as his directorial followup to A Star Is Born (naturally, he cast himself in the lead). If Leonard Bernstein didn't leave the mark he intended, it seems like a safe bet that he won't be any more forgotten in the 22nd century than he is now.
*Bernstein, who was born in 1918, would have turned 101 this August, and not 100, but Centennial Plus One just doesn't have the same ring to it. Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than Life plays Stroum Jewish Community Center, 3801 E. Mercer Way on Mercer Island, on Sunday, March 31, at 4pm. Pre-sale tickets are sold out, but there will be a standby line. This year's SJFF opened on March 23 and runs through April 7 (after taking a break between April 1 and April 5). For more information, please click here.
GRETA (Neil Jordan, Ireland/USA, 2018, Rated R, 98 minutes)
"For some reason, I could relate to somebody whose loneliness drives them utterly insane."
--Neil Jordan to Mark Olsen of The Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2019
There's nothing wrong with feeling lonely. It's human, it happens, and it
doesn't make anyone a loser. When it hits, there's nothing wrong with
reaching out to someone who might feel the same way, whether for a day or for a lifetime. Maybe that person is significantly younger; maybe they're significantly older. In either case, it doesn't necessarily mean that the part-
icipants are looking for a surrogate child or parent--not every relationship has to be Freudian, dammit. Maybe they just share common interests and enjoy a friendly rapport. It isn't outside the realm of possibility.
In Greta, one of Neil Jordan's most disappointing films, loneliness makes one character stupidly gullible and the other dangerously psychotic. Can a character be lonely in this film without making the worst possible choices? No, they can't, and that's a significant bummer in light of Jordan triumphs, like 1986's Mona Lisa and 1992's The Crying Game, in which seemingly mismatched characters ease each other's loneliness--at least for a time.
Greta is Jordan's second film, after 2007's The Brave One, to take place in Manhattan, though he filmed it in Dublin and Toronto. Because he prioritizes interiors over exteriors, the geographical subterfuge isn't too obvious, except when it comes to Greta's flat, which looks very European, but so is she, so I was willing to let it go, though Jim Sheridan did an even better job at transforming Dublin into Queens in Get Rich or Die Tryin' (to the extent that most viewers probably failed to peg it as an Irish production).
Frances with roommate Erica (Maika Monroe)
Chloë Grace Moretz, so good in last year's The Miseducation of Cameron Post, plays Frances, a waitress at a high-end eatery, who meets Isabelle Huppert's Greta, a retired piano teacher (shades of a certain Michael Haneke film) when she finds a malachite-green handbag on the subway. Anybody else would keep the bag--and the money inside--or call its owner, but Frances is still recovering from the loss of her mother the year before. She's stupid with grief. Or maybe she's just stupid, because she hand-delivers the bag to its grateful owner. The minute she steps across Greta's shadowy threshold, the film segues from the convivial vibe of Sean Baker's Starlet, in which a young woman befriends a significantly older one, to the studio thrillers of the Poppy Bush Interzone in which members of straight society tangled with outcasts of various kinds and paid the price for their transgression.
If you've watched the trailer--and even if you haven't--it's no spoiler to say that Greta isn't right in the head. We've seen her kind before in clammy two-handers, from Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction toRob Reiner's Misery to Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female. The bad gals in these movies want things they can't have, like other women's husbands--or lives. They aren’t sane, they never will be, and death is the only solution to their dilemma.
At first Frances falls for Greta's old world charms, but the minute she finds out that the handbag was planted specifically to lure a sucker like her, she tries to extricate herself from Greta’s grasp, but the older woman refuses to let her go. The stalking culminates in a scene in which Greta has a table-overturning tantrum at Frances' place of employment. Her freak-out is so over the top that I lost all interest in the film right then and there. If Jordan had gone full-bore into camp, I might have enjoyed the tonal shift, but the film has a certain classy veneer--it was shot by Atonement's Seamus McGarvey--that makes the loopy stuff seem more misjudged than not. Granted, it's a fine line, and Jordan got the balance right in his full-blooded adaptations of Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto in which fantasy helps his imaginative characters to weather dark times.
No such luck with Greta. The film, which Jordan co-wrote with Ray Wright (The Crazies), abandons its intriguing premise the minute the titular character reveals her true colors. Granted, Huppert appears to have relished the opportunity to chew gum like a bratty teenager, to dance around her living room in stocking feet, and to jab a hypodermic in the neck of a familiar Jordan player, but the film has nothing to say about loneliness that you haven't heard before, i.e. it's for losers and loonies. Except that it isn't. And I wish the very talented Neil Jordan had made a film about that.
Greta opens on Friday, March 1, at AMC Pacific Place (600 Pine St) and AMC Seattle 10 (4500 Ninth Ave NE). Images from Focus Features.
"I stabbed a sonofabitch."
--Zain (Zain Al Rafeea)
If it's possible for a 12-year-old Syrian refugee to exhibit all the brooding rebelliousness of James Dean at the peak of his powers, Zain Al Rafeea has got it on lock.
With his full lips and attractively-mussed hair, it's clear that he's going to grow up to be a heart-breaker. In Nadine Labaki's third film, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, he plays Zain Al Hajj, a boy who wants to sue his parents. When the judge asks why, he explains, "Because I was born."
It isn't clear at first why Zain thinks his parents are so terrible, other than that they're as poor as dirt. Labaki (who plays his mother) uses the scene to springboard into the recent past. Until he ends up in court, the undocumented boy earns his keep by making corner shop deliveries and selling juice to passersby. If he's surly to adults, he's protective of his 11-year-old sister, Zarah. When she gets her first period, he knows exactly what to do. It seems odd that he would know more than a girl, but he's a crafty kid. He's also worried that shopkeeper Assaad will attempt to buy Zarah off his parents when he finds out about her step into adulthood.
After Zarah exits the scene, just as Zain predicted she would, he raises a ruckus, so his mother slaps him around and curses him with impunity. It's the last straw. He steals a bag of groceries, hops on a bus, and finds himself at an amusement park where he befriends Ethiopian migrant worker and single mother Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw, a potent mix of mystery, vulnerability, and resilience), who invites him to stay with her and her baby, Yonas, in their corrugated-tin shack.
At this point, Labaki switches the focus to Rahil's increasingly desperate attempts to remain in the country. When she fails to return home one day, Zain is left to figure out what happened to her and to look after Yonas. It would be a tall order for anyone, but especially for a 12-year-old without a cell phone and very little money. It's a tall order for Al Rafeea, too, since he has to spend a substantial amount of time dodging aggressive pedestrians on crowded city streets while holding a hungry infant. If he has a good, strong grip, it's nerve-wracking watching him try to navigate a single block.
The longer Rahil is away, the more impoverished Zain becomes. If he's resourceful as hell, he's no miracle worker, and in time, he runs out of water, food, and shelter. By opening Capernaum in a court room, Labaki signals to the audience that he'll emerge from her film alive, but Zarah, Rahil, and Yonas are another story (to which she will eventually return).
By the time Zain ends up in court, it comes more as a relief than a disappointment, since his days on the streets were surely numbered, though I never bought the suit against his parents. If Labaki uses it as a framing device, even she seems to lose interest, since she speeds though it so quickly, but she makes up for it with an array of colorful characters like the milky-eyed baby merchant and the uniquely elegant Cockroach Man. She paints a multi-faceted portrait of life among Beirut's underclass. No wonder she named her film capernaüm, aka chaos.
And then there's Zain, who never stops being engaging. He's clever, funny, and can swear like a man four times his age. He isn’t perfect, and he makes mistakes, but Labaki gives every indication that he isn't going to follow in his parents' footsteps. His future may be unwritten--but at least he has one.
Capernaum plays SIFF Cinema Uptown from Friday through Thursday, February 7-14. Images from Women and Hollywood ("Capernaum Director Nadine Labaki Discusses the Film’s Chaos and Empathy") and Film Forum.
TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (Charles Burnett, US, 1990, 101 minutes, new restoration)
"When you're made to feel half a man, what do you think the other half is?"
--Harry Mention (Danny Glover)
It says everything about Danny Glover that he co-produced To Sleep With Anger three years after 1987's Lethal Weapon solidified his stardom. Instead of more big-budget genre fare, he took the time to work with Charles Burnett. If Burnett's 1977 debut, Killer of Sheep, is now considered a classic, it was rarely screened for 30 years, largely due to music rights issues (the National Film Registry added To Sleep With Anger to its ranks in 2017, 27 years after Killer of Sheep). Glover, in other words, was taking a chance, no matter how well respected the LA Rebellion director was at the time.
In Burnett's third film, which the Criterion Collection will be releasing on February 26, Glover's Harry Mention doesn't make his entrance until the 14:49-minute mark, time enough for the filmmaker to shape the contours of a middle-class Black family in South Central Los Angeles. Harry, a Southern family friend traveling from Detroit to Oakland, says that he could use a place to stay (Glover's hair has been dusted with grey to make him appear older than his 44 years). He's a superstitious gentleman with strange beliefs, but Suzie (Mary Alice) appreciates his old fashioned courtliness. Her husband, Gideon (Paul Butler), is just happy to reminisce about old times.
The audience knows better. Minor, if troubling events transpire just before Harry gets to town, and the phenomena intensifies upon his arrival. The way Burnett keeps returning to an ominous flock of birds gathering around the house brings Daphne du Maurier's 1952 short story (and Alfred Hitchcock's subsequent film) The Birds to mind. They know what’s up.
Henry G. Sanders and Kaycee Moore in Killer of Sheep
As Harry goes about his business, he discomforts every member of the family, including Gideon and Suzie's sons, Junior (Carl Lumbly, star of Burnett's 1996 TV movie Nightjohn) and Sam, aka Babe Brother (Richard Brooks, seconds away from his role as ADA Paul Robinette on Law & Order), and their wives, especially Babe Brother's spouse, Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph). If the insecure Babe Brother is susceptible to Harry's charms, the self-assured Junior is not. Other skeptics include Hattie (Ethel Ayler), a former lover who has found God. The more Harry needles her, the saltier she gets. He has a way of reminding people about things that they'd rather forget, and whenever he pulls out his knife to cut an apple or to clean his nails, he seems to be taunting those who believe him capable of murder.
The longer he stays, the more the situation devolves. If anything, Harry seems to be feeding off of the family's energy as if it were blood (at which point I have to mention that the delicately pretty Vonetta McGee, who plays Junior's pregnant wife, previously starred as the love interest in Blacula). As they grow more fatigued and take to fighting among themselves, Harry becomes more powerful and persuasive to the extent that Babe Brother is tempted to follow him right our of town, wife and child be damned.
Does Harry represent the way black Southerners can never truly escape a past rooted in slavery? Or is he a devil in the shape of a man? It's to Bur-
nett's credit--and the film's benefit--that he doesn't spell it out, though the word "devil" is right there in the script (spoken by Suzie, if I'm not mistak-
en), so that's part of it, but since To Sleep With Anger isn’t a conventional horror film, possession doesn't answer every question his presence raises.
Brooks, Glover, Ralph, and DeVaughn Nixon as Sunny
If the film wasn't a hit, mostly because it played in few theaters and didn't have the chance to reach many viewers, it's only grown in stature since. That said, Burnett has never been much of a visual stylist and the performance quality is variable, which may come as a surprise, since he was working with an experienced cast for the first time, but the bit players bring a certain charm to the scenario. Harry's friends, who all gather for a seemingly endless house party, are all under his sway, so it only makes sense that they're a little stiff and awkward--hypnotized, you might say (they also provide a lot of the film's humor with their odd manners, cock-of-the-walk outfits, and colloquial sayings).
But Danny Glover! I don't want to say that he's the reason to see the film, because that isn't fair to Burnett, who wrote and directed it, but if Glover wasn't able to master Harry's dual persona, the real and the supernatural, it wouldn't work, but it does, because he never overplays his hand. Harry isn't a mustache-twirling villain and any violent tendencies are merely implied or suggested. Together, Burnett and Glover created an indelible character out of the most rudimentary elements. Harry doesn't bring evil into the lives of the family. The evil is already there; he just holds the key to unlock it.
Whether Glover sees the film as a turning point in his career, I couldn't say, but through his production shingle, Louverture Films, he's ushered in an array of well-crafted films on social issues, most recently Matt Porterfield's Sollers Point and Nadine Labaki's Capernaum. He's also taken small, but pivotal roles in films from emerging directors, like Tom E. Brown (Pushing Dead) and Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You). Chances are, the desire to be a force for good in the filmmaking world was always there, but Charles Burnett, much like Harry Mention, provided the key that he needed.
To Sleep With Anger plays Northwest Film Forum February 13, 15, and 16.
The film begins with a body. As all detective dramas must.
A thoroughly de-glamorized Nicole Kidman, in Charlize Theron-in-Monster-mode, plays the grubby gumshoe at the center of Karyn Kusama's sun-blasted noir. Granted, in Patty Jenkins's Monster, Theron played a criminal (serial killer Aileen Wuornos), whereas Kidman's Det. Erin Bell is a crime-solver, but she shares the unkempt hair and charisma-deprived personality. I wouldn't call her ugly, though; it's more that she looks unwell and chronically unhappy.
Bell suspects that the victim has a connection to a case she worked 17 years ago. Back then, the fresh-faced Bell worked undercover with Chris (an effectively low-key Sebastian Stan) to infiltrate a robbery ring. She has the same three dots tattooed on the back of her neck as the dead man.
As set-ups go, it's a familiar one, but it's always a pleasure to watch Kusama shape genre to her own ends as she did in Girlfight, a sports drama about a teen girl determined to be a boxer (Michelle Rodriguez in her silver-screen debut), and The Invitation, a horror film about a dinner party gone terribly awry (I haven’t seen Jennifer’s Body or Æon Flux, her sole big-budget production, which featured Theron in the title role).
To solve the case, Bell has to revisit her past, which helps to explain her present, like the estrangement between her and her 16-year-old daughter, Shelby (a suitably pouty Jade Pettyjohn). Bell's drinking led the court to award her ex (a bearded, sad-eyed Scoot McNairy) custody, but now Shelby appears to be heading down the same path. When Bell finds out that she's seeing Jay (Beau Knapp), a lanky lowlife several years her senior, she tries to intervene, but the bitter, defiant Shelby isn't having it.
Michiel Huisman and Tammy Blanchard in The Invitation
As Bell catches up with the former robbery ring members, she finds that none of them are doing particularly well. This isn't a film in which crime pays, not even for Bradley Whitford's Get Out-adjacent McMansion dweller, but nor does Kusama present Bell as heroic. She's a dogged detective and, like most of the director's protagonists, she knows how to defend herself, but she's otherwise a surly mess, and unlike Lee Israel, the surly mess played by Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she isn't the least bit funny (not, for that matter, is anyone else in the film). Kusama presents the Los Angeles Bell inhabits as similarly un-glamorous. This is the rundown, pitiless city of Jacques Demy's Model Shop or Sean Baker's Tangerine.
And then Bell goes rogue. She's already told her partner to let her handle things herself, after which she takes a hostage (Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany) and cuts off all communications with the LAPD (as embodied by Toby Huss). If it isn't clear from the start, it's clear by the end: this is a woman who doesn't think she has anything left to lose, so she sets out to solve the crime her own way, thus "fixing" the past as much as anyone can. I'm pretty sure Janis Joplin wrote a song about that kinda worldview.
Kidman is adept at capturing Bell during two very different stages of her life, though it's always a risk to play a character so closed off from the world, especially when she's surrounded by others who are equally off-putting, but the script from The Invitation's Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi allows Bell's façade to develop just enough cracks to let a little vulnerability shine through. Although Kusama probably didn't consult Lynne Ramsay while working on her film, Destroyer almost feels like a companion to You Were Never Really Here with Kidman playing a female version of Joaquin Phoenix's brutal, but not entirely dehumanized hitman.
“I'm not good," Bell admits at her most vulnerable, except that it isn't true, and the most tragic thing about her isn't who she is and what she's done--and she's done some pretty bad things--but that she can't see that.
Destroyer opens at AMC Pacific Place on Friday, January 18.
ON HER SHOULDERS (Alexandria Bombach, US, 2018, 94 minutes)
Alexandria Bombach doesn't build her documentary around a person with a particular job, but rather a person with a particular request. That's how subject Nadia Murad, the soft-spoken 23-year-old at its center, describes herself to the filmmaker. Through public appearances, she seeks assistance on behalf of the Yazidis (a non-Muslim minority), who suffered genocide at the hands of ISIS or Daesh in Northern Iraq in 2014.
Nadia's highest profile appearance takes place in 2015 when she speaks in front of the UN Security Council. Though the UN's Simone Monasebian encourages her to describe herself as an activist, Nadia sees herself as a refugee. Simone doesn't understand why she can’t be both, but Nadia doesn't look at the situation through the same lens. When a Canadian radio host asks about her life before ISIS, she mentions school and farming. When ISIS came to her village, they killed most of the men and all of the older women. They raped younger women, like Nadia, repeatedly. It's difficult to listen to her detail such atrocities, but it must be worse to relive them.
Nadia is a slight figure with long, dark hair, who once dreamed of opening a beauty salon. She has the calm, thoughtful countenance of Charlotte Gainsbourg, circa Jane Eyre. When she smiles, which isn't often, she puts her entire face into it. She's close to Murad Ismael, the 30-year-old executive director of Yazda, who has become a sort of surrogate brother (he also serves as her translator). If she cries on occasion, she spends more time comforting the Yazidis she meets at protest marches and in refugee camps. It means everything to them that she has become their face to the world.
From Canada, Nadia travels to Greece and then to New York where the UN appoints her Goodwill Ambassador for Human Trafficking (human rights attorney Amal Clooney accompanies her on the trip). As the end credits indicate, Nadia has continued to advocate for the Yazidi people ever since.
If she didn't set out to become an activist, she has proven to be a very effective one. As a filmmaker, Bombach (Frame by Frame) treats her with respect, but stops short of full-fledged worship. Nadia is still a human being, albeit one with more passion and poise than most.
If there's a subtext to Bombach's film it's that even well meaning people don't always know how to respond to someone like Nadia. Politicians and journalists come across as concerned in a way that seems more awkward than insincere. They can't decide whether to treat her like a delicate flower or a grizzled warrior, and her reserved manner throws them off. It's not that she's cold so much as self-contained, possibly why she never opens up in the film as much as she could have. It feels like she's holding some-
thing back, but maybe that's the only way to get from day to day, dredging up terrible memories to discomforted people for the greater good.
Endnote:On Her Shoulders plays the Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Avenue) through Thursday, January 10. Check the website for times.
Because I started reviewing films for The Stranger's SIFF Notes during the first week in April, the 25-day film festival has felt more like a three-month affair to me. Granted, it still sped by relatively quickly, even as I attended two conferences (MoPOP's Pop Conference and Crypticon), worked on several non-fest reviews and previews, got back together with someone--and broke up with that person all over again (suffice to say, I'm a little...tired).
I also caught up with a few non-fest movies and television shows, like Black Panther and iZombie, but I've tried to make SIFF my priority. Consequently, I caught over 30 films, even though I didn't attend any press screenings or take any time off work. Here are a few more words about the films I saw.
Blaze
Ethan Hawke's third narrative feature, a time-fractured docudrama about country songwriter Blaze Foley (née Mike Fuller), is his best yet (I haven't seen his sole documentary, Seymour: An Introduction). Little Rock musician Ben Dickey is convincing as the unpredictable Blaze, but the standout is Austin native Charlie Sexton as the slippery Townes Van Zandt (he and Hawke previously worked together in Richard Linklater's Boyhood).
Hawke in conversation with Indiewire's Eric Kohn
Other notable performers include Alia Shawkat as Blaze's wife and Alynda Segarra (Hurray for the Riff Raff) as his sister. In a brief scene, Segarra sings with Kris Kristofferson, who plays the Fullers' memory-challenged father, which reminded me of Michael Almereyda's casting of Sam Shepard as Hawke's ghostly father in his modern-day adaptation of Hamlet. Based on Hawke's career to date, it's hard not to see both multi-hyphenates as models for the kind of career he would like to have. Oddly, the clip collection SIFF assembled for their tribute to Hawke omitted this film, a favorite of mine from both actor and director.
Eighth Grade
The directorial debut from author, musician, and stand-up comedian Bo Burnham is far better than it has any right to be. I mean, he's only 27, and he's already enjoyed success in several fields. Turns out, he can direct, too. At the SIFF premiere, he gave much of the credit to 15-year-old Elsie Fisher, who plays acne-prone Kayla Day, but this isn't as performatively magnanimous as it sounds. Burnham wrote a wise and witty script, but without the right actress, the kind who can elicit sympathy even as she tortures her father with self-aborption, that wouldn't have been enough.
Burnham and Fisher in a rare moment of levity
The point of the film isn't exactly a new one, but we can always use more perceptive perspectives on adolescence, and the 21st-century milieu changes everything. If Kayla has more than a few things in common with Pretty in Pink's Andie, right down to the supportive single father (nicely played by Josh Hamilton, who also appears in Blaze), she lives in a world that is totally wired. If anything, she lives in two worlds: the real one, where she feels like a hopeless outcast, and the virtual one where she follows unworthy crush objects on Instagram and uploads affirmative videos to YouTube.
Despite all her trials and tribulations, we know she'll be fine in the end, because she doesn't let disappointment slow her down. I'm twice the age of filmmaker and actor combined, and yet Kayla is as much of an inspiration for chronic self-doubters like myself as for kids her own age, of which there were many in the audience, all eager to ask Fisher questions at the lively Q&A. By the fest's conclusion, Eighth Grade had won Golden Space Needle awards for best film and actress. It opens at the Egyptian on July 19.
Hal
I've been a Hal Ashby fan for as long as I can remember, at least since 1978's Coming Home, so I had high hopes for first-time filmmaker Amy Scott's documentary. Fortunately, she delivers. The setup is a simple one, and it works perfectly: she uses Ashby's major films, including Harold and Maude and Being There (which played at this year's fest), as a structuring device. She also has Ben Foster, who appears in Debra Granik's Leave No Trace, read from Ashby's no-bullshit memos, and he proves a fine fit.
Fisher looks towards SIFF's Beth Barrett
The problem with this sort of setup is that the last section, a consideration of Ashby's less significant (and more heavily compromised) films, feels anti-climactic, but I'm not sure there's a more honest way to sum up his career. Towards the end of his life, Ashby had several ideas for literary adaptations that might have put him back on the map, but he didn't live long enough to realize any of them. There really isn't a positive way to spin that story. It's tragic that he didn't get the chance to make a single one, but making seven great films, largely as intended, is the exact opposite of tragic. If anything, it's miraculous.
Leave No Trace
When it comes to any film, regardless as to the subject or director, I try to keep my expectations in check. I let my enthusiasm for Hal Ashby run away with me when it came to Hal, so I was relieved that Scott came through, but as impressive as I found Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, I kept an open mind about Leave No Trace, a loose adaptation of Peter Rock's novel, My Abandonment (co-written with producer Anne Rosselini). The primary reason: Ben Foster grates on my nerves, especially when he plays bad guys (Alpha Dog, 3:10 to Yuma), but give the guy credit: he never phones it in.
Hal producer Brian Morrow and film critic Michael Dare
I should have had more faith in Granik, not just in terms of her casting, but her directing. Playing a single father on the run from straight society, Foster beautifully underplays from start to finish, which makes thematic sense, since Will is keeping a lot inside, but it also makes structural sense, because his daughter, played by Thomasin McKenzie, provides the film's point of view as surely as Jennifer Lawrence's Ree did in Winter's Bone. And the New Zealand native is every bit as good in a slightly less showy part.
As much as I hate to pit the films against each other, I would give the edge to Leave No Trace, largely because there are no real antagonists in the latter. Every time Will and Tom tangle with authority figures of some kind, they turn out to be pretty reasonable people. It's no spoiler to say that Will is his own worst enemy, but he's still a loving father and Tom is still a good kid. She owes that to him, but that doesn't mean he's a reliable provider.
Friends have compared the film to Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic, and there are clear parallels, but at heart, it's more like Jeff Preiss's Low Down, in which John Hawkes, who starred in Winter's Bone, plays jazz pianist Joe Albany, a single father with a lot of love and a host of parental challenges. In look and feel, it also has a lot in common with Kelly Reichardt's Oregon-set films about poverty and dislocation, like Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
SIFF programmer Megan Leonard and Anne Rosselini
Just as local label Light in the Attic will be releasing the soundtrack to Blaze, they'll be releasing the soundtrack to Leave No Trace. When I spoke with Rosselini at the screening, she credited my friend, Pat Thomas, for putting her and Granik in touch with Kendra Smith who sings the closing track. According to Thomas, it represents her "first new music since 1994." At the Q&A, Rosselini said that Smith, a former member of Rain Parade and Opal, "lives about 99% off the grid." Former Fug Michael Hurley and Marisa Anderson, who will be opening for Joan Shelley on June 19, also appear in the film as denizens of the trailer park where Will and Tom wind up during one of their breaks from forest living.
From the music to the extras, it was lovely to see so much local involvement in Leave No Trace, especially the Northwest itself as a place to which you can escape, but where you can never really get away from yourself.
Other films I saw and enjoyed:Being Frank:
The Chris Sievey Story, Belle de Jour, Peter Strickland's portion ("The Cobbler's Lot") of The Field Guide to Evil, First Reformed, McQueen, Puzzle, and Sorry to Bother You. Films that didn't quite live up to their potential: Dark River, Let the Sunshine In (I know I'm in the minority with Denis' film), Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, and Wild Nights with Emily. Endnote:Click here for my first SIFF '18 dispatch.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
